What I'm Reading
Finished
Rule 34
by Charles Stross.
Near future SF
with a police officer investigating a spate of suspicious deaths.

Fortunately the title doesn't have much to do with the book itself.
Theoretically the police officer is in charge of a "Rule 34 squad"
investigating Internet memes which might have an impact on crime in her
Edinburgh location, which doesn't make much sense, but she's immediately
seconded to a murder investigation so it's not really relevant.

Good points: the book is packed full of clever, up to date ideas
that could be grabbed from Wired or BoingBoing. 3D printers,
a permanent deflationary recession, corporate psychopathy,
augmented reality, CDOs, a black
market in illegal biochemistry. Has a reasonably fast plot though
the ending is heavily telegraphed.

Bad points: I really miss the days when SF writers couldn't write relationships,
knew they couldn't write relationships, and so didn't write relationships.
If you can't write even basic relationships from your own experience, cramming
in angst-ridden polyamorous lesbians and guilt-ridden closeted gay/bi men
isn't that great an idea.
It's not convincing, it's not involving; and it was, it would just wreck
the novel in a different way:
you wouldn't care about augmented
reality specs if you really empathized with a fellow human being's marriage
breaking up.

Also multiple points of view doesn't work too well when the author isn't
too good at creating an individual voice for each character:
they all sound much the same.

Overall though: fairly entertaining and worthwhile if you're an SF
fan and can cope with large quantities of Internet jargon.

What I'm Watching
Saw
Life of Pi
in 3D at the cinema.
Adaptation of the allegorical/magical realist short novel
about a boy who trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger
after a shipwreck.

Liked this movie a lot. The animation and the 3D are glorious:
the opening scene panning through the zoo practically justified
the ticket price itself. The movie has a kind of quirky
Wes Anderson feel, though it's directed by Ang Lee: scenes in
India and France are idealized rather than realistic.
The story keeps your attention too: it helps that the lifeboat
bit doesn't start till about half-way through.

However, the allegorical stuff is hammered home rather more
heavy-handedly than the book, which makes it a bit cloying at times.
The god stuff might annoy both militant atheists and literal-minded
religious people with the insinuation that God is a
beautiful myth.

Overall though, very good movie, well worth seeing in 3D at the cinema.

Museums
Saw the grandly titled
Constable,
Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape
at the Royal Academy.
Got a ticket on the door with no queue on a Sunday afternoon though.
The emphasis of the exhibition is on etchings, which apparently helped popularize
landscape painting, bringing it forward from its status beneath history painting.

Quite a few of the works have some kind of classical theme, including
Cicero in the garden.
There are quite a few paintings, but it's actually the etchings that seem
most impressive, especially in how they achieve the effects of bright light
with just white space to work with.

While the article makes the case that slavery couldn't exist without statewide military force (which was economically required to be a militia in 18-19th century America), it doesn't explain how non-slave states could handle Indian issues, nor the general hostility to standing federal troops. A single voice (perferably non-Federalist) yankee or otherwise hostile to slavery isn't even included to claim this single purpose of the law.

The real problem is the timing. The bill of rights existed as a supplement to the original constitution to limit its power. If there was a constitutional need to keep "other persons" in chains the original document would never have passed without it.

I find Stross' writing really frustrating. I like the ideas behind a lot of his books, but his characters drive me mad. I read one of the Laundry series whose character's matey way of speaking was infuriating - and his girlfriend might as well have been his pet dog for all the depth she had.

Not the only reason, but a reason. There was a lot of dancing in the Constitution around slavery. The Constitution really needs to be read with historical context. That whole second amendment with the part on militias doesn't make much sense without historical context. And the ideas that get passed around these days around the second amendment are right out there. Americans are by and far a people that don't understand their own history.

i think the idea of the second amendment... by gzt (4.00 / 1) #4Fri Jan 18, 2013 at 02:57:19 PM EST

...was more along the lines of what the Swiss historically had and still have now. and also still made sense even as our militias died out in the context of expanding west despite hostile (and quite rightly so) natives.

At the time of writing, we'd just won a war using militias. The people who wrote it also had a bad experience with the standing armies and mercenaries of their home country. Militias were a way of having defense without standing armies.---[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

The constitution does allow for a standing army by lm (4.00 / 1) #7Fri Jan 18, 2013 at 07:45:05 PM EST

But also gives to the federal government to power to ``provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.''

At best a standing army was seen as a necessary evil by the framers of the Constitution. That the drafts allowed for a standing army was probably the most persuasive anti-Federalist argument of the time.

The founders had hoped that most defense matters could be done by militias.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.Cicero, The Republic

Most defense was expected to be against Indians, slaves and possibly Canada. There was no real threat of an external invasion of any size. It's been a hallmark of US defense policy from the start. Any inititial invasion from an outside party should be able to be held or even thrown off by a quickly organized defense and militias were part of that. Also communication was poor so local response was needed. The US never needed a large standing Army. But I think we're really arguing the same point. And it's a point that most Americans, and especially not the NRA, have argued. The second amendment was to support local defense against outsiders. So where does that leave us in the 21st Century with sattelites, radar, radio and air support?

Kind of like the war of 1812. Re-invasion from Britain was very much on the minds of the new country.There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.Cicero, The Republic

And the War of 1812 was not a massive invasion that couldn't be imediately responded to with local forces to be followed up by a central response. The thing about the US, even then, is that it was so geographically disperse that no threat of invasion existed which could impact the whole nation. Any invasion, then and now, is local or regional.

But the fear of invasion was still there by lm (4.00 / 1) #12Sun Jan 20, 2013 at 08:16:11 AM EST

And just two years later in 1791, the same year that the Bill of Rights was ratified, the the Legion of the United States was created as a standing army.There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.Cicero, The Republic

and preferred his more committed forces. Militias have been pretty spotty. IRC, the forces defending DC during 1812 were militias, but DC was saved by veterans who showed up during the civil war (Monocacy, an obscure battle that just happens to be nearby me and the related park is good for short hikes with little planning).

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